Alternative Energy Sources

I would like you know everybody's general thoughts on alternative fuels, and aleternative energy.

Personally, I think ethanol is a great thing and I'm hoping it gets picked up by more manufacturers. Hydro-fuel cells also seem quite promising, being more efficient and not producing hazardous emissions themselves. Windmills probably won't do us a whole lot of good.

Please, I beg of everybody to keep your answers concise. There's no precise questions - just post your thoughts in general (things you would like to say).

I think we should use all available means, wind, solar, methane production and perhaps tidal power, and convert everything to hydrogen for energy storage.
I like the idea of each part of the country exploiting the means best suited to it's climate. The Pacific Northwest, for instance, would do best with methane, whereas the southwest could be strong in solar.
My preference for how to harvest solar power is not photovoltaic, but as heat to generate steam.
In all this, some better means of utilizing our waste is desirable: methane from sewage and organic waste, and some means of utilizing combustible trash.

Staff: Mentor

I was reading about diesel cars adapted to run on used cooking oil. Apparently it works well. The diesel engine was originally designed to eun on peanut oil.

Now your car exhaust can smell like Thai food or french fries, depending on what was cooked in the oil. :tongue:

Grease Burning cars

"Oct. 15, 2005 — Whenever James Nestor needs to fill the tank of his diesel Mercedes, he doesn't go to a filling station and pay $3 a gallon; he visits his favorite Indian restaurant in downtown San Francisco and gets takeout — free jugs of used cooking oil."

I think we should use all available means, wind, solar, methane production and perhaps tidal power, and convert everything to hydrogen for energy storage.

I'm not too sure about tidal power myself... I don't know too much about it, but the ecological cost of damming an estuary, and the effects of disrupting sediment input to adjacent coasts (think coastal erosion) could be quite extensive.

I'm not too sure about tidal power myself... I don't know too much about it, but the ecological cost of damming an estuary, and the effects of disrupting sediment input to adjacent coasts (think coastal erosion) could be quite extensive.

You may be right. I haven't looked very deeply into tidal power in realistic terms. It strikes me as having great potential simply from living on the coast here, and seeing enormous quantities of water moving back and forth every day.

actually, Wind Turbines will do us a whole lot of good. if sufficiently deployed, they can replace all our energy needs.

I was having a conversation with one of my professors today and we were discussing such things. He says that wind will NEVER go beyond 30% of our needs. Nothing is going to replace our needs entirely. We'll kinda end up where we are now, 20% for this, 10% of that, 50% that, 10% of this, 5% of that, 5% of this. Hopefully that 50% would be nuclear fission since fusion isn't happening for a while.

Hell, no one wants to live near a nuclear reactor... but what the hell else are we going to do? That's what people need to learn. It's not a perfect solution but hey, no one promised a perfect solution.

We could build solar panels on Mercury, and just tether a really long cable between our two planets.

More realistically, it seems that a resurgence in cheap public transportation is in order. What's the deal with those mag-lev trains? It seems that if those were popularized in America, it could save alot of people alot of time and money in the long run.

Our family has photovoltaics and we love'em. They require a lot to produce, but in the end produce far more --- net gain is they are about 30% the "cost" (petroleum products etc) as more conventional energy sources.

We're also big on "reduction." We grow as much food as we can, to reduce on shipping and packaging of food etc. While this "solution" isn't what you have in mind when you say alternative energy, it is tangentially related.

Diablo Canyon Units 1 and 2 are both still online (and are both considered the most technologically advanced reactor units ever built in America) and San Onofre Units 2 and 3 are both still online. San Onofre Unit 1 was an older (Generation 1) reactor design. It was retired in the 90's because maintenance costs were piling up and because it made sense to decommission it before the San Onofre employees who were experts on that particular reactor unit retired.http://www.sce.com/PowerandEnvironm...eNuclearGeneratingStation/Decommissioning.htm

Q.Why is SONGS 1 being decommissioned now?

A. Because now is the best time, based on reevaluation of SONGS 1's situation.
When SONGS 1 was shut down in 1992, the plan was to decommission the plant at the same time as SONGS 2 and 3, which won't be retired until at least 2022.
The recent reevaluation determined that decommissioning SONGS 1 sooner would result in less cost and use the knowledge of employees who are familiar with SONGS 1.